


The Last Gateway

by thedevilchicken



Category: Original Work
Genre: Alien/Human Relationships, Anal Fingering, Barebacking, Cybernetics, Getting Together, Knights - Freeform, M/M, Object Insertion, Science Fiction, Size Difference, Size Kink, Time Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:35:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,636
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28227747
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thedevilchicken/pseuds/thedevilchicken
Summary: Séverin, a new Knight of the Fourth Order, steps through the gateway to the Node to have his new armour forged.He's not quite prepared to meet Nine, the armourer.
Relationships: Original Male Character/Original Male Character, Very Attractive Knight/Gruff Armourer Forging His New Armour
Comments: 8
Kudos: 163
Collections: Mistletoe Exchange 2020





	The Last Gateway

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Nununununu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nununununu/gifts).



> Written for the tag "Very Attractive Knight/Gruff Armourer Forging His New Armour" - it's just that it's more sci-fi than medieval!

The armour flows over his body. It's like mercury, like shining silver water, and it covers him completely.

The six knights of the Fourth Order all have suits like it, or at least they're mostly alike. They wear a three-inch chestpiece that's been surgically anchored down into their sternum, wired to the beat of their heart so with their death their armour becomes instantly inert, just in case the Eltins try to take them. Two strong taps with their forefingers, both together, and the armour deploys beneath their clothes, the membrane of it thin enough that it doesn't usually do much damage but they usually prefer to undress first. Now, as his armour shimmers over his skin and begins to coalesce, he's naked just like the first time he tried it on.

It doesn't look like it should help much, but it does - the things that Séverin has seen and done over the years, he knows he'd have died without it. It protects him from the timeflow when he steps into the past. It protects him from bullets and Eltin energy pulses, the ones that haven't been invented yet, not in his time. He saw his armour made, but it's not from his time, either. Very little about the human-Eltin war makes sense, but he's still fighting it. 

Until today, he was fighting it. Now he has just one trip left, but it's not into the past: it's into the Node. 

\---

The Node exists outside of normal space and time. 

His first time in, Séverin believed he understood that. He'd been briefed on it, after all. He'd done the training, though he had to admit he was sketchy on the science - they all were, and they still are, because the engineers who'd made it hadn't quite existed yet, way off in the future. and when he came to the gateway, when he passed the mirrorlike event horizon and entered the Node, he thought he was prepared, he really wasn't. 

The space he entered seemed to peter out into a strange black void at the limit of shiny black floor tiles - there were no walls on two sides and a number of closed doors on the others, no windows, no visible light source though the space was still well-lit. The gateway through which he'd stepped and then abruptly fallen was behind him, shimmering. And when the room around him stopped spinning and he stood up from his hands and knees, he wasn't alone. 

The briefing he'd attended on his official induction into the Order had explained who he'd be meeting: the Armourer's name was Nine, and he was an Eltin clone. There are no clones in Séverin's time, of course, because they can't survive the journey backwards; the Eltins can, but they all died before their gateways came online. Their underclass of clones had rebelled once they'd understood their plan, but they couldn't stop the gateways from initiating: they punched holes back into the past so that their ancestors could slip back in time and take Earth before defences could be mounted. Now, while human armies fight forces from the future, all the Order can do is track those gateways down before time itself is too corrupted to survive. 

Nine looked at him. Séverin is not a small man; he's met men taller than him, now and then, but he'd always been the tallest in his classes, the strongest, the smartest. When Nine stood, though, he must have been seven feet tall and he had the pink-tinged, light grey skin of an Eltin clone. His long silver hair hung in a braid down his back and he looked at Séverin with pure black eyes, empty like a fucking shark. Eltins look like humans, just a little shorter than the average; they'd made their clones different from themselves on purpose, so they could always be told apart. And Nine almost made Séverin feel small. 

"I'm here for my armour," Séverin said, and Nine's mouth twisted wryly. 

"Of course you are," he said. "Does anyone come here for any other reason?"

He eyed Séverin for a moment, frowning, then gestured across the room with one shiny cybernetic arm; he had the sleeves of his charcoal grey overalls rolled up to the elbows and Séverin could see both his arms were cybernetically enhanced: one arm seemed to have been fully replaced, though the join must have been somewhere higher up under his sleeve, and the other was a strange mix of organic and robotic from the below down. He had his first two fingers and his right thumb, and one half of his forearm, but the rest was shiny metal. 

"Take your clothes off," Nine said. "Stand in the scanner. Let's get this over with." 

He stood naked in the scanner for the next half hour, not that time meant a great deal inside the Node when he knew it would appear to the officers in the gateway room outside that he'd been away only an instant. He stood there naked while the scanning arms of the transparent chamber caught every inch and rendered him in excruciating detail on a large holodisplay. Séverin knew he was generally considered an attractive man - he had his Moroccan parents' thick dark hair and hazel eyes, an easy smile and the kind of strong physique he'd worked hard for, even if he didn't like to show it off. Standing there naked in the slightly chilly room, though, was worse than stripping down for swimming training back in the Order academy. Nine didn't even look at the real him - he looked at the virtual version rendering holographically there at his workstation. 

"You can put your clothes back on now," Nine told him, when the scans were apparently complete, and he turned back to him as he started to dress. "You'll stay here until it's finished. Use the bed through the second door. Read a book. Play some chess - don't be surprised if the AI beats you. And don't step past the edge." He lifted one metal arm into the air and pointed past the tiles into the void then waved his fingers, the ones that were half grey skin and half advanced robotics that definitely didn't exist yet in Séverin's time.His mouth twisted. He cocked his head. "That's how accidents happen." 

Nine turned away. Séverin knew what he was meant to do: the briefing said to do exactly as Nine told him and in a few days' time, he'd have his armour and be ready to track down Eltin gateways. He was meant to go through the second door and play games with a computer until Nine told him his armour was ready and he could leave the Node again. But that just seemed like such a wasted opportunity. 

"Can I watch?" he asked instead, and Nine turned back to him. He knitted his fingers together in his lap as he sat there on his high stool in front of the strange naked hologram of Séverin. He eyed him, perhaps a little curiously. 

"Will you be quiet?" he asked. 

"If you want me to be." 

Nine nodded. He gestured to a second stool. And Séverin pulled it over to the bench and perched himself on top of it - for perhaps the first time since he was twelve years old, he felt like he was too small for the seat he'd been offered. 

He remembers watching him work. Nine was big, yes, and his hands were huge, so maybe the precision to his movements was unexpected. He was deft, and as much as it was engineering, Séverin understood it was also like art. He watched him sculpting the digital prototype around him, elegantly, in sweeps of his palms and flicks of his fingers that made Séverin wish he had any talent in that direction at all. 

"Can I try?" he asked, when Nine finally took a break and stood and stretched. He frowned at him, looking down at him with those odd black eyes. Séverin couldn't even start to tell how old he was - the silver hair was a marker of the fact he was a clone rather than a marker of his age, so the briefing said, and he'd already been present in the Node when its gateway had opened. It was the only thing the Eltin clones could do to help: they couldn't travel backwards from their time any more than humans could travel forward from theirs, but the Node stands outside of all of that. All they can offer is the armour that they make, and what little useful information they still have. 

Nine didn't reply. He just brushed aside the hologram of Séverin and dragged up another, this time himself, and waved vaguely at it before he wandered off. The hologram was naked, just like Séverin's, and he could see the places where the cybernetic parts joined his body, the long lines where metal met skin, one whole shoulder missing and beneath the scarred skin of his jaw there was a chunk of metal there as well. He could see the definition of his muscles, the silver hair that dusted his chest and led down between his thighs. He was big there, too, even soft and represented in a hologram, thick and uncut and Séverin rolled his eyes at his own ridiculous reaction. Four hours in the space outside time, four hours watching the man work, and already his mind was wandering in indecent ways. 

He was terrible at it, just as he'd expected. Some of the things about the system were intuitive but most definitely weren't and the armour he molded around Nine's body was bulky and rough and left a lot to be desired. Nine reappeared with two cups as he was smoothing a section down over the hologram's thigh and snorted in amusement, and he leaned up against Séverin's back once he'd put the cups down. He leaned past him, guided his hand, showed him how with his two organic fingers brushing there against his skin. He was warm, smelled not unpleasantly like the inside of the Order's mechanic's workshop, and when he chuckled at Séverin's next attempt, Séverin felt the rumble of it through Nine's chest into his back. His cheeks turned warm, and he should've known better. 

They worked side by side for the rest of the day, not that he supposed night and day meant very much where they were then. Time passed inside the Node in a very different way to how it did outside, in its strange pocket of space-time that the clones hard carved out for it, but time did pass, and work progressed, and every now and then Nine leaned over to lend a hand. He showed him how to zoom in and Séverin almost choked on his cup of water as he accidentally pushed in tight on the holographic Nine's backside; Nine just clucked his tongue and tried not to smile. And then, once they'd eaten together at the workstation, they went to their separate rooms to sleep. 

He remembers undressing, and hearing Nine doing the same through the too-thin walls. He remembers lying in the borrowed bed and wondering pathetically if Nine slept clothed or naked; he'd stripped down to his underwear himself, and the temptation to slip his hand down underneath his waistband and wrap his fingers tight around himself was greater than he might have liked. He didn't, though - at least not that night. He did it the second night instead, after a full day's work, lying there in bed with the most minute details of Nine's body right there in his mind. The way the models moved was so real - he'd shifted Nine's legs so he could see how the armour reacted when he walked, moved his arms to see how his range of movement was affected, and he had to admit Nine's movement wasn't the only thing it had affected. He tried to be quiet. When he came, he bit his lip. 

"Do you see a lot of people here?" Séverin asked, on the third day. 

Nine chuckled, apparently amused by the concept. "No," he replied, and gave him a brief sideways glance. "I see the people who need armour, and the people who come to me for information."

"You don't see your own people?" 

Nine sighed. He set his hands down flat on the worktop, underneath the holograms. 

"No," he said. "They can send equipment and supplies, but with the way the gateways were engineered, we could only send one clone through." He lifted his metal hand. "I took the least effort." 

"So you can't go back?"

Nine looked at him, sitting there close to him, and the light caught his eyes at just the right angle; Séverin could see they weren't completely black after all but midnight blue just at the centre, looking straight at him. Nine clenched his jaw. His mouth twisted. 

"No, I can't," he said. "I knew that when I came here." 

"How long has it been?"

Nine rubbed his neck, turned his head, looked away; Séverin saw the muscles work as he swallowed. "I don't know," he said. "I haven't asked." 

He didn't ask if he was lonely there, seeing only the humans who came through, and maybe that was why he was brusque and abrupt and occasionally grating. He didn't ask, and not only because he stood and walked away. He couldn't help but understand the answer would be yes, and he knew he had nothing else to say to that. All he could do was wait until they'd both gone to bed that night and stroke himself under the sheets, wondering if maybe he could help with that just for a while, and if Nine would even want him to.

The following day, Nine started working with materials instead of with the holograms. He pulled up the machinery, set transparent guards in place around the bay, then started work while Séverin watched. And it was fascinating: it was the strangest blend of tech and blacksmithing he'd ever seen, with near-unbearable heat and the strike of an oddly high-tech hammer. He didn't understand. He supposed he didn't actually need to, but Nine made fascinating viewing. 

It was a shorter day than usual; the physical labour of it seemed to tire Nine more quickly than the holographic prototyping, which Séverin couldn't say surprised him. They ate together and they talked a little, about Séverin's understanding of the job he'd do once he put on his armour, about the life that Nine had had before the clone rebellion. He'd been thirty-four years old before his seclusion in the Node, he said - thirty-four years since maturation, when he'd emerged from the lab just like all the others. He'd been their ninth completed clone project, hence his name. And they all looked alike, all hundred and six of them - except, of course, for Nine's arms. 

"Do any of the other knights actually talk to you?" Séverin asked, as they took their empty plates through to the strange little kitchen. Behind the cabinets, the room ended in that unnerving void that made Séverin's pulse thud every time he got uncomfortably close to it. 

"You're the first," Nine replied. "Mostly, they're too busy thinking about this." And he held out his plate just beyond the limit of the cabinets, the limit of the Node's strange space; half of it just vanished into nothing. Then he put the ruined plate down on the counter and he rested his half-metal hand on Séverin's shoulder. He was close to him, almost too close, huge and hot, the heat of him making Séverin's face feel warm and his stomach tight. He had a strong jaw and a straight nose and every part of him seemed to have been arranged according to some general sense of aesthetic perfection that was just a little off from what humanity in general might have come to expect. His grey skin and not entirely black eyes were slightly unnerving. The sheer bulk of him was slightly unnerving. And when he squeezed Séverin's shoulder, his hand part metal and part bare skin, Séverin was flooded with the terrible understanding that he was entirely attracted to him. He'd have liked that unnerving bulk to press him down and fuck him. He hadn't thought about that since before the academy.

"You know, I almost wish you hadn't," Nine said. "Isn't that ridiculous?" But he didn't seem to expect an answer. He just laughed exasperatedly - apparently at himself - then took back his hand and left him there. 

Séverin couldn't sleep. He tried, he supposed, though he'd never been good at _making_ himself sleep, until he pulled himself back up out of bed and went back out into the Node's main space. The lights were relatively low - he still had no idea how they worked but they responded to Nine's voice when he told them to increase or decrease their intensity. He wasn't sure he needed much light, though, as he went to the workstation and settled there on the stool he'd been occupying for the past four days, shivering slightly - it hadn't been a perfect idea to go there in his underwear, he realised, when the temperature was kept at a level more for Nine than for his visitors. He supposed their planet must have been cooler than Earth, though he realised he didn't know much about it. Their people had been at war through time, in the future and now extending back into the past, and he wasn't even sure what Eltin's surface looked like. Perhaps he'd ask. 

For the moment, though, what he did was pull up his model - his model of Nine. All he really meant to do was practice a bit, play with sculpting better armour though he supposed once his own was ready he'd have no use for that skill at all. He really only meant to sit there until he felt ready to sleep, but he found himself removing sections of his terribly rendered armouring, stripping the model back down to bare skin until Nine was standing there in miniature in front of him. It was easy enough to make him kneel, thighs spread, sitting back on his heels with his silver hands hanging down to either side. It was easy enough to sweep his long braid forward over his shoulder and let it hang there, almost brushing his cock. And as his own cock began to stiffen, he wondered if there might be a way to see Nine's do that, too. It wasn't like he could ask, though, so what he did was make the model larger, a quarter-scale Nine kneeling there on the bench in front of him. And he slipped one hand down into his underwear. 

"I don't usually use that for sex," Nine said, and Séverin froze. His face felt hot and his fingers felt cold and his heart thumped in his chest and he really couldn't turn; he hadn't expected to be caught like that. It didn't matter, though, because Nine came closer. He leaned against the desk and fuck, _fuck_ , apparently he did sleep naked, with his long hair untied, but all he did was waft one hand just so and the holographic version of him there in front of Séverin shifted slightly. Its cock stiffened, and turned a deep grey-pink just at the tip, and Nine just shook his head. 

"I don't understand you," he said, and then he left him there with his lurid holographic counterpart there still in front of him. And all Séverin could do was stroke himself roughly, until he came with a muffled, half-embarrassed groan. He supposed at least when he turned off the simulation and returned to bed, he was tired enough to sleep.

The following day, they worked. There were sections of armour ready for testing and Séverin sat there awkwardly on a metal medical table, trousers off, boots abandoned, so Nine could test the flow of the armour over one calf, then one arm. It was a little tight, so he made adjustments, and Séverin couldn't help it: when Nine was kneeling there on the shiny black tiles, he was imagining him like in the hologram, naked, cock stiff, huge and perfect. He wondered if Nine ever touched himself with those chilly metal fingers. He wondered if clones had a sex drive at all or if the Eltin had decided to engineer them without it. But he couldn't help but think the hologram had known what Nine would look like because, at some point, he'd shown it. 

He could feel himself blushing as Nine's fingers touched him. He could feel his cock start to stir, though he willed it not to. Then Nine told him, "Take your clothes off. We should do a full test." So he did, because what else could he do? He stripped off his black t-shirt and his underwear and he stood there in front of him, naked and entirely aware of it. Then Nine took the armour's chestpiece - as yet unwired - and he stuck it to the centre of Séverin's chest with some kind of temporary glue. 

"Tap it," he said. "Both forefingers." He frowned down at him as Séverin did so. "Harder." He lifted his hands and demonstrated the necessary pressure with his own forefingers against the skin just above the chestpiece. Séverin shivered - he couldn't help himself. And then he did as he was told, and he tapped again. 

The armour flowed out over him, from the chestpiece and over his collarbones, down his arms, up to his chin. He understood that eventually it would cover his whole face, too, but it stopped there as it spread down his chest, over his back, ran like water down his legs and wrapped his feet. It was warm and it didn't feel bad at all, just strange, like stepping into a warm bath in mid-air. But then the liquid metal slipped between his thighs and seemed to cradle his balls up closer to his body. It slipped down over his cock and covered it obscenely, not like any of the other knights' armour that he'd seen. And as the liquid teased a little at the slit in his tip, he felt it flowing down to cover his arse. He felt it slip between his cheeks and flow _inside_ him, into his hole, where it started to harden into armour. It thickened. It stiffened. It opened him up. When it was done, he was hotly aware of the fact that his own armour was penetrating him, and that Nine was the one who'd made it do it. Nine, who was watching him placidly. 

"Does all the armour you make do this?" he asked. 

"Do what?" 

"You know what." 

Nine shook his head. He stepped closer. "No," he said. "This one's just for you. I thought you'd like it." He stepped closer still, until Séverin was backed up against the table. He rested his hands there on the metal with a clink. "Was I wrong?"

"No." Séverin pulled himself up tall. He felt his hole clench around the thing inside him. "No, you weren't wrong." 

"And this?" Nine ran one hand down between Séverin's legs, over his armoured cock. As he looked down, he could see the detail of it as he stiffened quickly: the ridge around the head, the way a flexible tendril of armour metal teased at his tip, and fuck, _fuck_ , it was warm and slick and teased inside just a little, filling the head and making him throb. His knees felt weak and he leaned back. And then Nine tapped quickly on the chestpiece and in seconds, dizzyingly, the whole assembly of the armour withdrew again and left him naked and erect. 

"I'll make a few modifications," Nine said, as he unstuck the chestpiece from Séverin's sternum and set it aside, but he didn't go anywhere. He got closer; he ran his fingers over Séverin's chest where the armour had been, ran them up to his neck, cupped his jaw. He leaned so close that Séverin's cock dragged against his overalls and made him shiver. Then he rested his forehead down against his. 

"I wish I'd said no," he said. "When you asked if you could watch. I wish I'd said no." 

"I don't," Séverin replied. "Why do you?" 

But Nine didn't reply. He just stepped back and unzipped his overalls. He pushed them down, let them gather at his knees, and Séverin didn't really have much else to say to that - Nine was hard, his grey cock flushed a perfect blushing pink just at the head where a drop of moisture glistened and made Séverin consider dropping to his knees and sucking him right then and there. He was big, his cock long and thick, the largest Séverin had ever seen up close, and he felt his hole clench tight as he imagined it inside him. He wanted that. So much it made his cock stiffen harder, so hard it almost hurt. 

"Turn around," Nine told him, so he did. He turned to face the table and though he hadn't been told to lean down he did it anyway, and Nine laughed, low and rough. He ran his hands over Séverin's hips, squeezed there, let his cock rest against the cleft of his arse, raked his fingertips down the length of his back and rubbed with his thumbs there, lightly, right at the indent at the base of his spine. 

"What do you want?" Nine asked. "Do you want my fingers?" He ran the smooth tips of his metal fingers there against Séverin's rim. "Do you want my cock?" He pressed the moist tip of it against him, hot and blunt. " _What do you want_?"

"Fingers," Séverin said, feeling his cock kick between his thighs at the thought of it, though he didn't have to use his imagination for particularly long. Nine leaned away to the nearby shelves and came back with a jar of oil, unscrewed the top and set it on the table. He dipped his metal fingers into it, the first two on his left arm, then ran them down between Séverin's cheeks. He rubbed there, pressing firmly, holding him down with his other hand splayed between his shoulders. And he pushed in, slowly, pushed his cold metal fingertips in past Séverin's rim and made him shiver with it, with the chill and the fucking inexorable penetration, slow but big enough to take his breath away. 

Once they stopped, once they were in as deep as they could go, Séverin gasped a breath against the table, saw his breath fog against it, pressed his hands there so hard his fingertips whitened. He hadn't done this since he'd started at the Academy, his first year, eighteen years old, another cadet, though it wasn't as if he hadn't enjoyed it - sometimes he fucked himself with his own fingers, but it was nothing like this. Nine shifted his hand but not far, not far enough, and Séverin moved his hips instead, pushed back, fucked himself on Nine's unyielding metal fingers as he heard Nine groan low down in his throat. He felt him rub his cock between his thighs as Séverin moved, as he took him in down to the knuckles, but then he pulled his hand away. And just as Séverin might have contemplated forming a complaint, he saw him oil his other fingers, his organic ones, before he pressed them to his hole. They were hot where the others were cold, softer to the others' implacable hardness, and they pushed inside him, slick and hot and deep. He rubbed his rim with his thumb around his fingers there inside him and Séverin moaned, Séverin pushed back against him, fucking wanton, wanting more. 

"I want your cock," he said, sounding raw and ridiculous even to himself but Nine didn't seem to find it funny. He made a low sort of sound as he pulled his fingers back, as he pulled his fingers out, and then he dipped them back into the oil, slicked himself, used more, rubbed his tip between Séverin's cheeks. He was so fucking big, this giant of a man whose first two fingers had felt just as big inside him as any cock he'd ever taken, and Séverin didn't bother biting back his groan of obscene fucking pleasure as he felt Nine start to push inside. He wanted to be full of him and it was a tight fit, yes, made his breath catch and his pulse race and his hole ache, but it felt fantastic. It made his head spin as he reached back with both hands to pull his cheeks apart like maybe that would help to get his cock inside him and maybe it did: it took a few minutes, a few slow and tantalising minutes, but then Nine's hips were pressed up flush against his arse and Nine's cock was in him, so fucking deep it was almost overwhelming. 

He fucked him like that, slow but firm, until Séverin was pleased the table was bolted down onto the floor. He fucked him, slick with oil and so hot, his hands gripping his hips as Séverin rocked back to meet his thrusts. He screwed his eyes shut and took him deep, over and over, until Nine's breath was harsh and fuck, one of Nine's hands dipped down past Séverin's hip and all it took was a few erratic strokes of his slick metal fingers against his oversensitive cock and he came with a weak-kneed jerk so that all that was stopping him slipping to the floor was the table he was leaning on and Nine's cock still inside him. None that Nine's cock stayed there for long: he came, too, gripping his hips and bucking against him, as he pulsed his release inside his hole. 

It wasn't long before Nine pulled out, awkwardly, a trickle of his come escaping that ran down behind Séverin's balls. He didn't mind, he thought, as he pushed himself up, as he took a deep breath; his hole ached pleasantly, slick with Nine's come as it was, and Nine was looking at him with those black-blue eyes, not very far away. Nine's lips were parted. His breath was still loud. And he didn't get to recover it; he stepped back in and pressed his mouth to Séverin's. He tangled his fingers in Séverin's hair. 

They went to bed together that night - to Nine's bed, where he'd slept every night for who even knew how long, though they knew the armour was finished and now that it was, Séverin would have to leave. He was tempted to stay for a while, a few days, because who would know? But, in the morning, he stripped and lay back on the table. Nine attached his chestpiece. And, at the end of the day, when equipment far more advanced than anything on Earth had healed him from the surgery, they both knew he had to go. 

"I'll come back," Séverin said, and Nine's mouth twisted wryly. 

"I'm sure you will," he replied, and he kissed him, roughly, though it deepened, slowed, turned into something Séverin would have liked to chase a little longer though he knew he had to go. 

"I'll come back," he said again, as they stood there by the gateway. And then, he left. 

Over the years, he's gone back. He kept his word. It's just not been quite as often as he would've liked, though he knows Nine understands. He's fighting a war, not just for Earth but so time won't begin unravelling. This was always what he went there for. 

He was twenty-four years old the first time they met. Last month, Séverin had his forty-ninth birthday; he's the oldest surviving knight of the Fourth Order, because usually they don't last long. The only way he can explain the fact he's still alive is the armour that Nine made for him - the armour that he's put on now, that he wears as he passes through the gateway and steps into the Node. And, once he's there, he taps the chestplate and pulls the armour back again. He bares himself completely.

"You cut your hair," Nine says. Séverin doesn't say that was eight years ago. And neither of them says he's aged, but they both know he has. They don't say Nine has barely aged a day. 

All these years have led him here, to a moment when for Nine, it's been months since the day they met, and for him it's been years. He's fought a war. He's been to planets that he'd never known existed. And every day he's thought about Nine's silver fingers and the glint of blue in his black eyes. 

He wraps his arms around him. "We closed the last gateway," he says, and Nine chuckles as he brushes his fingertips across his close-shorn hair, so new to Nine but not to Séverin. 

"The last but one," Nine says, and gestures to the mirrorlike horizon. But Séverin pulls back and shakes his head. 

"The last one," he says, and he means it. And he sees it on Nine's face in the instant that he understands that what he's seeing there is no longer a gateway to the past because they closed it. Séverin can't travel forward. Nine can't travel back. Neither of them can leave this place, and this is what Séverin has done so they won't part again. 

Nine kisses him so hard it almost hurts. Nine kisses him so hard it takes his breath away. 

The war is over. This is their happy ending. And when Nine smiles at him, so awed and perfect, Séverin can feel no regrets.


End file.
